Self-study
Hi everyone!
I’ve been studying on and off for the LSAT since early 2025, but now that I’ve graduated college, I started taking it more seriously in April of this year. I’m doing okay in LR. I’ve worked my way up to level 3 difficulty and have been getting those questions correct about 70% of the time, although I still have a lot of fluctuation.
So far, I’ve mainly focused on LR since it makes up the majority of the test. Should I keep focusing on LR until I feel more comfortable with it, or should I start incorporating RC now? Do you guys usually alternate sections day by day?
On one hand, I’m worried that if I start RC, I’ll lose momentum and focus with LR. But on the other hand, I’m afraid that if I wait until the end to practice RC, I won’t have enough time to improve and might lose some of my LR skills too.
Hoping to score at least a 160 by September or October. My last PT was a 151.
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3 comments
I actually do think it’s smart to get an early foothold on LR first because like you said, LR is weighted twice as much as RC.
But also like K13 mentioned, LR does give the basic foundations for issue identification, reasoning, relevance checks etc. And on the flip side the stronger structural reading needed in RC does tend to improve our ability to stay on issue in LR.
But I also wouldn’t wait too long to introduce RC.
My suggestion is once you feel like you have a pretty solid working handle on, say, 8–10 of the major LR question types, that’s probably a good time to start incorporating RC more seriously.
And I also think it's important to measure 'early success' on each section properly. Early on, it is not really about raw scores and accuracy yet. Personally, I’d measure early LR progress more by how much command/control you feel over the individual question types.
I’d define early RC success less by question accuracy and more by how efficiently you’re able to pull the big picture out of the passage during the first read-through.
For a September/October test, I’d probably want to be in a reasonably comfortable position on both fronts by early July so you have enough runway to integrate everything together under timed conditions.
@SCOTT_LEBO Thank you!
I think they go hand in hand more than you think- I started scoring better when I started thinking of RC as long LR, that being said get the foundations down.